IV

MAUPASSANT AND POE

Maupassant saw life with his senses, and he reflected on it in a purely animal revolt, the recoil of the hurt animal. His observation is not, as it has been hastily assumed to be, cold; it is as superficially emotional as that of the average sensual man, and its cynicism is only another, not less superficial, kind of feeling. He saw life in all its details, and his soul was entangled in the details. He saw it without order, without recompense, without pity; he saw it too clearly to be duped by appearances, and too narrowly to distinguish any light beyond what seemed to him the enclosing bounds of darkness.

-Arthur Symons.

Had Poe possessed a small, bright intellect, proportioned to his nature, he would have been a happy and successful man, but unknown. Had he possessed a nature commensurate with his intellect, he would have been one of the greatest of the human

race.

- Hawthorne.

MAUPASSANT AND POE

IT may be we should never have heard of Guy

de Maupassant had there been no Edgar Allan Poe. Both men were masters of the short story; both were gifted with that clear, penetrating intellectual sight which goes at once with unerring certainty to the heart of the thing to be portrayed; both were able to compress a world of meaning into the narrow compass of a few pages; both were cynical and took dark, pessimistic views of life; both passed in youth through the dismal process of endeavoring to adapt a highly poetic temperament, fine tastes, and unusual gifts to a commercial pursuit; and both made a failure as dismal as the process itself. But when you come to the substance of their work, the material selected, the situations chosen, and the effect produced, you find in the productions of Maupassant, to remind you of Poe, only here and there a lowering storm-cloud that soon dissolves in light and flowers and song. Of Poe's soul of horror, that "mystic obsession" of terror, that weird and desolating beauty that unites in one alluring romance and companionless despair, almost nothing is to be found in the brilliant pages of our French author.

Though both writers were cynical, pessimistic, and at times despondent, Maupassant's view of life had in it some of those brighter and more pleasing features the want of which often ren

ders the work of Poe distressing to the ordinary reader. Maupassant had great delight in nature. He could lie for hours upon the grass or beneath the spreading branches of a leafy tree, perfectly happy in the contemplation of the verdured earth and so much of the blue sky as could disclose itself through interlacing boughs. Flowers gave him exquisite pleasure. The sounds of nature intoxicated him. The moaning of the wind in the tree-tops, the chirp of insects, and the song of birds,— especially that of the nightingale, filled him with indescribable satisfaction. The roar of the ocean rendered him oblivious of all else. The sights of nature had upon him much the same effect that natural sounds had. Cattle browsing in the fields, the simple life of the peasant, the landscape, and, above all, the joyous existence of children,- of these he could not have too much. His was not the old pagan pleasure; it was rather the artistic delight of the modern mind. His senses were keen and alert. He had what has been called "a joyous animalism," in which the spiritual element was singularly wanting. He reveled in form and color with an artist's joy. His ears were sensitive to every sound. The whisper of love, the cry of passion, the note of terror, and the shout of triumph all seized upon him and held him fast. But the seizure was upon the physical side of his nature.

Of course he reappears in his books. Every man is in a measure the hero of his own story.

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His life was not pure; why should we expect to find immaculate purity in his work? Where the flame is not without smoke there must be some smudge of soot. His stories are coarse and some of them are, if we mince not our words, libidinous. But they are not all of them evil, and perhaps few that are evil are wholly so. He portrayed vice, but it can hardly be said that he rendered it attractive. There was with it too much of the horror of its fruitage. His descriptive powers were great, but he could describe only that of which he had himself knowledge. Passion he could paint, and as well ❝ the raptures and roses of vice," but of love in its better meaning he knew nothing. Of marriage he had a poor opinion. His soul was incapable of that sacred union. "Boule de Suif," which gave Maupassant his sudden recognition, illustrates what we are saying. The motif of the story is certainly not elevating. It presents us with a clear, remorseless, and witty picture of selfishness and insincerity. It brings out the sordid side of huIt shows up the meanness and rottenness of those who pretend to a virtue they do not possess. Uncleanness plays a large part, but surely the reader is not made to love evil. The reading brings with it an inward disgust, a loathing, a sense of foulness, but the story is moral in the same way that Daudet's "Sappho is moral. The latter romance may be played upon the stage in such a way as to make it lascivious to the very last degree,— it was so played.

man nature.

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